The prior art includes various methods and devices for displaying electronic program guide (EPG) information. Commonly, such information is displayed as a grid of cells. Channels are often listed along the vertical axis while time is displayed along the horizontal axis. Programs are represented by cells that have a horizontal length that corresponds to the temporal length of the program.
In many television systems, there may be one hundred or more channels that need to be displayed by an EPG. Given that most EPGs list between three and ten channels per page, it is clear that many pages of EPG screens may be needed to present all of the EPG data. This may make it difficult for users of EPGs to quickly and efficiently find the programming that they are interested in.
In order to alleviate the foregoing problem, some prior art systems utilize theme based searches of individual programs. Such theme based searching may provide the user with a list of individual programs that match a certain theme, e.g. movies, sports, news. Another prior art solution is the user based creation of favorite channel lists. Favorite channel lists allow the user to create mini-EPGs which just show the channels that the user is interested in. In this way, the user may not have to page through screens of data related to television channels that he is not interested in. Experience shows that the foregoing methods of filtering EPG data down to a useable size are not ideal. Many users may find the listing of individual programs provided by a theme based search to be cumbersome. Further, it may take a considerable amount of time and effort to create favorite lists in a system that has many hundreds of channels.